"Good Enuff" Production Values - A New Model of Social Media Production

Been on a rant recently about a new production option for the social web in face of ubiquitous, cheaper, faster "Good Enuff" technologies like camera phones and laptop editware.

This tech democracy is amplifying how wasteful micro-site development (just make a really hype MySpace page or YouTube Channel with widgeted contents and plow all your budget into savvy media buys) and the overly produced "viral" video is. On YouTube, people probably don't care about our craft. So get to the idea quick(er), cheap(er). Stop pursuing perfect and make it "Good Enuff".

"Good Enuff" isn't just for users, it enables us marketers to shoot more ideas fast(er), cheap(er) instead of rolling all our energies into a single overly produced "perfect" idea that just may fail. So fail fast(er). And fail cheap(er).

At the Social, good ideas are still seen as good ideas as long as production values are "good enuff" (Can they see it? Check? Can they hear it? Good, ship it and see how it fares on YouTube and Digg). And bad ideas aren't made any better on the social web because they were shot expensively (honestly all that gloss goes over the heads of low bandwidth viewers who are skeptical of commercial gloss).

Success at The Social dictates that it is best to fail fast(er) and cheap(er) and Try, Try Again till you strike the right "viral" chord (the more important pursuit).

Below is an interesting user-gen commercial for Trader Joes - shot on a handheld Palm Treo. 212,491 views so far on YouTube.

Guilty Pleasure: Big Ideas, Don't Get Any/Radiohead "Nude"

Radiohead held an online contest to remix "Nude" from their album - "In Rainbows". I found this (late) entry to be particularly fascinating and breakout. It takes a bit to get to the "beat" but well worth it as it builds and mashes the music utilizing Sinclair ZX Spectrum Guitars, Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer, HP Scanjet 3c, and Hard Drive arrays. Of particular note is his savvy working of the social net touchpoints to get the work slippy.